The Vedas survived three thousand years mostly by memory, not by writing
Hinduism's oldest scriptures were composed in north-western India from around 1500 BCE and handed down orally, using elaborate memory techniques, for thousands of years. Today some of their mantras are chanted for their sound rather than their meaning, treated as rhythms that renew the cosmos each time they are recited.
Veda means knowledge, from a root meaning to know that is cousin to the Latin video, I see, and the English wit. There are four collections: the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda. Each is layered. The Samhitas hold hymns and mantras; the Brahmanas are prose explanations of ritual; the Aranyakas, or wilderness texts, were composed by forest recluses reinterpreting ceremonies symbolically; and the Upanishads turn to meditation and philosophy.
Dating follows that layering. The oldest part of the Rigveda, books 2 to 9, took shape in the Punjab between about 1500 and 1200 BCE. The other Samhitas followed between 1200 and 900 BCE farther east, between the Yamuna and Ganges rivers in the land of the Kuru kingdom. The earliest Brahmanas date to about 900 BCE and the youngest, such as the Shatapatha, were finished by around 700 BCE. Hymns in the oldest layer call on gods like Indra and Agni for success in battle and the welfare of the clan. Maurice Bloomfield's concordance of 1907 counted some 89,000 metrical feet of mantras, 72,000 of them in the four Samhitas.
Hindus class the Vedas as sruti, what is heard, as opposed to smriti, what is remembered, a category that includes the Bhagavad Gita and the great epics. Orthodox theologians call them authorless, revelations perceived by sages in deep meditation; the Mahabharata credits the god Brahma. The hymns themselves take a more craftsmanlike view, describing sages fashioning them the way a carpenter builds a chariot.
The texts also split Indian thought. Six orthodox schools accept Vedic authority, while traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Charvaka rejected it and are called heterodox. Later scholars, including Adi Shankara, divided each Veda into a ritual portion and a knowledge portion. The Indologist Axel Michaels notes that the standard fourfold division is linguistically shaky but worth keeping because it tracks Indian tradition and rough chronology.
Source: Vedas
